The Tennessean

Tune In

The second season of “Nashville” debuts at 9 p.m. Wednesday on ABC. Emmys Awards: See if Connie Britton wins her Lead Actress in a Drama Series category when the primetime Emmy Awards air at 7 p.m. today on CBS.

Season opener

As shooting for “Nashville’s” second season began this summer, creator and executive producer Callie Khouri told The Tennessean that viewers were in for drama. “Everything that can happen in a country song will happen,” she said. After a cliffhanger- packed Season 1 finale, here’s a quick rundown of what lies ahead: • Rayna and Deacon’s car crash: Assuming two of the show’s most popular characters make it out alive (spoiler alert: they do), what repercussions will the show’s star-crossed lovers have to deal with? • Gunnar and Scarlett’s future: Gunnar popped the question to Scarlett at Centennial Park, but viewers have yet to hear her answer. • Teddy and Peggy’s baby: The TV mayor (and Rayna’s ex-husband) receives the startling news that his former flame Peggy (played by Kimberly Williams-Paisley) is pregnant. • New faces: Charlie Bewley (“Twilight”), Aubrey Peeples (“Sharknado”), Oliver Hudson (“Rules of Engagement”) and Chaley Rose are among actors playing new characters.

Maisy and Lennon Stella. / Larry McCormack / The Tennessean

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When sisters Lennon and Maisy Stella were younger, Lennon, now 14, would draw buttons on the front of a big cardboard box so her little sister could climb inside and pretend she was on television. Lennon made herself a remote control and would sit back and “change the channel” as Maisy, now 9, acted out a variety of parts, changing roles every time her sister clicked an imaginary button.

“I would be like, ‘cooking show’ or ‘Disney Channel,’ ” Maisy recalled. “Then Lennon would, like, change the channel and I would stop and do something completely different.”

Call it foreshadowing for the Stella sisters, who play the roles of Maddie (Lennon) and Daphne (Maisy) Conrad on ABC’s drama “Nashville.” The girls are the daughters of Connie Britton’s lead character, Rayna James, on the show, which returns for its second season on Wednesday night. When the Stella sisters were cast, their acting experience was limited to what happened inside that cardboard television.

Natural charm

Lennon and Maisy’s parents, Marylynne and Brad Stella, competed on the second season of CMT’s ill-fated talent search “Can You Duet?” Veronica Bozza was a producer, and the Stellas didn’t win but they remained friends with her. Bozza was the first one outside of the family to recognize Maisy’s natural flair for acting. With Maisy’s mother’s blessing, Bozza passed the girls’ information to a casting director. Maisy was 5.

Then tragedy struck: Bozza was murdered. Marylynne Stella said she never thought of the casting director again. More than two years later, the mother was attending the trial of the men accused of killing Bozza when a friend there said “Nashville” was casting for a girl about Maisy’s age. The friend asked permission to contact the casting director on Maisy’s behalf, and when she did, she discovered that it was the same woman Bozza had reached out to more than two years earlier. The director said she’d “had her eye on the Stellas’ girl” ever since.

At the time, “Nashville” was casting Rayna’s daughters as 6 and 8, and Maisy completed three auditions for the part of the 8-year-old. After the first two, she said, they winked at her and said, “We’ll see you again.” On the third, Marylynne Stella got an unexpected call as she was driving Maisy in for the audition. The casting director was frantically looking for Lennon. When creator and executive producer Callie Khouri heard Maisy had an older sister and that the two sang together, she started considering changing the ages of the Conrad girls.

Khouri said her “mind ran wild with possibilities.”

Since Lennon had been helping Maisy rehearse, she knew all the lines when she went in for the audition. After Lennon had been in the rehearsal for a while, they came out and asked Maisy to come in and sing with her sister.

Khouri was in the room during the audition, and Lennon and Maisy’s performance brought tears to her eyes.

“They sang a Jason Mraz song, and it was so beautiful, it was impossible not to get a little choked up,” Khouri said. “I’m only human. They were both charming and sweet, but more importantly, incredibly natural. And their voices and harmonies are stunningly beautiful.”

The Stella sisters were offered the parts, a moment Lennon called “super special and absolutely insane.” Khouri admitted hiring two inexperienced child actresses “was a big chance” to take. But, “we just all had such a good feeling about them,” she said. “They have not let us down. They are both a joy to work with.”

Steve Buchanan, president of Grand Ole Opry Group and “Nashville” executive producer, agreed.

“From the moment of first hearing Lennon and Maisy audition, and still today, I am always struck by how they merge their family harmony magic with a genuine unassuming charm, presence and creative instinct that knocks you out every time they sing,” he said.

Things fall into place

The Stella family’s celebration didn’t last long before the next obstacle. They had moved to Franklin from Canada a few years before to better accommodate Marylynne and Brad Stella’s publishing deal, and the girls didn’t have work visas.

The show petitioned Canada for the visas, but the mother had to prove that her daughters were legitimate singers and actresses.

“You have to have experience and you have to have press, and there’s this whole huge amount of stuff you have to get in order to get a visa and they didn’t have any of that,” Marylynne Stella said. “They were just a couple of kids who like to sing. We got all these great letters of recommendation, but the woman at immigration said that basically your recommendations are only as good as your resume.”

The mother got together with a friend with experience in marketing, and the two wrote a press release touting the girls to send to media outlets in their hometown of Oshawa, Canada. Because the sisters had never played their own shows, Marylynne Stella listed the times Lennon and Maisy had played on stage with her and their dad in Nashville.

She decided they needed a current YouTube video to accompany the release. So she interrupted Maisy’s sleepover, grabbed Lennon and plopped the two of them down at a table to make a video. They sang Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend,” and Marylynne posted it on her Facebook page at 2 a.m. The video went viral overnight, accumulating 2 million views in two days. It attracted the attention of the national media, and about 48 hours after Marylynne posted the video, the family was in New York City on “Good Morning America.”

“It seems impossible,” said Marylynne Stella. “Every press outlet on the planet exploded with Lennon and Maisy. It was a miracle, because it was the one thing that was keeping them from moving on with the show. No one knows the story because it’s too complex, with visas and murders. But something came forward for us 200 percent.”

Maisy has a couple of ideas about what or who came forward: “It was Veronica,” she said. “It was God.”

Life changed immediately.

They started filming the show around the same time the girls went back to school. Lennon said the same kids who had known her for years had a hard time adjusting to her new highly visible job as an actress, and her unpredictable schedule that required both sisters to split their time between public school and an on-set tutor.

“It was a weird thing for these people,” she said, lounging on the family’s vintage orange couch in the new home they bought this summer to be closer to the set. “I never was all that. I was never in school plays or anything. I was always so scared, I could never try out. They didn’t even know me as that, and then all of a sudden all this is happening. Not everyone responded positively.”

In addition, there was the added pressure of learning how to act. Maisy said that in the beginning if Lennon would accidentally swap a word in one of her lines, “I would panic and my face would go red,” Lennon said. “I was like, ‘They are going to fire me. They are going to write me out of the script.’ ”

As time went on, the girls figured out the script didn’t have to be “word for word.” Lennon said she calmed down as she started to get more comfortable with people.

“I had never been on a set before and never even thought about what a set would look like,” she said.

The girls’ parts started out small. Marylynne Stella said they were just meant to accentuate the Rayna James character, a role that earned Connie Britton an Emmy nomination this year. But as time went on, their roles grew, and by the end of the season, Lennon’s character, Maddie, was part of a major plot line. Maddie discovered that the man she had grown up knowing as her father really was not. Deacon, a musician friend of her mother’s they had always referred to as an uncle, was her father.

“You read (the script),” Lennon said, “and then it’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, how am I going to figure out a way to do that? That would be great with this professional actress I might see winning an Emmy, but how am I going to be able to do that? How am I going to cry on the spot?’

“I’ve finally just now gotten to the point where I can get the script and feel like I can do it.”

And other aspects of the sisters’ lives have gotten easier, too. When they moved to their new home earlier this summer, it meant they would also switch schools. Now, more than a month into the school year, they couldn’t be happier.

“I love my new school so much it’s crazy,” Maisy added excitedly. “I’m so excited in the morning when I wake up to go to school.”

As for filming the show’s Season 2, Lennon said it was “the same amount of amazing, it’s just gotten more comfortable.”

“Every day is completely a new adventure,” she said. “The cast is such an amazing group of people and it’s such a cool thing that we get to learn from them. They’re all just great humans. They’ve become a family to us.”

“I never believed it when people said their crew was like family, but I can’t even name one person who’s gotten the slightest on my nerves,” Maisy added, “other than Lennon.”